Berthold Brecht once said:"The opposite of good is not evil, it's good intention". Unfortunately, this article is filled to the brim with good intentions.
If I could talk to my 20 year old self I would recommend this: Stay away from the Internet as much as possible and don't look for general advice.
Most information is of little use no matter whether it's right, wrong, deep, entertaining, scientific, religious, whatever... Many may realize that but they continue to consume. The common trap is that most of us think there is no downside to consuming information and this, in my humble opinion is a huge mistake! It seems to me that the more stuff we shovel into our heads, the less able we are to get active.
There is constantly such a long queue of inputs our brain wants to process that we have little energy left to actually develop intentions. When intention crystallize, motivation follows and so does action. I'd argue that people of average intelligence are not lacking success because they miss precious advice. It's because they don't actually have intentions! They can't allow themselves (mainly for financial oder societal reason, I assume) to relax and wait for curiosity to kick in. Instead they have it backwards: They hear about people who are having a career, they hear about others forming families, they hear the news telling them how the IOT is the future, they read up on cool stuff on wikipedia, read the biographies of celebreties, random stuff on reddit, they read career advice .... And then, from all that garbage, they try to deduce what to do. In most cases, that doesn't truly work because the result is not in line with their natural appetites and abilities.
My 16-year-old self had to catch a bus and a train to get to a reference library in order to answer any but the most trivial questions.
My 20-year-old self got 90%+ of the information I needed to succeed from the internet. I taught myself coding, 3D graphics, game development, rendering, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
My present-day self still relies on the internet for a huge percentage of my information, and you know what? Having done it both ways, it's far more efficient and far more effective than catching a bus to the library.
IMHO it is not the Internet that's the problem. The constant connectivity is killing productivity.
Every morning I used to start my day with reading HN, on the bus to school I surfed the web. At uni, on every break I used to take out my phone and browse some more. After school I binge-watched TV shows and surfed more. My attention span got so divided that I couldn't concentrate watching a single episode, I constantly switched to a browser to surf more.
I learned a lot about programming, but my personal life suffered.
I couldn't meet deadlines, couldn't study for uni (studying law).
In the end I concluded that I had developed something like an internet addiction.
Furthermore, it wasn't just limited to internet. I stopped changing clothes, stopped keeping my already cluttered room in a somewhat liveable standard, stopped caring for my health, ate a lot of junk food, got hooked to TV-Shows.
Now, instead of constant short bursts of divided internet surfing, I am trying to set out a time for surfing. And outside those hours, I go offline.
It has been a though switch, but I slowly feel that I'm getting my impulse control back.
I recently started reading Deep Work by Cal Newport, I can recommend it to anyone trying to get off the vicious cycle.
I've also started to disconnect. I also find my productivity far higher without the Internet. Sometimes just a notebook and a pen are more than sufficient, and I can get some serious work done, manipulating equations, drawing diagrams, documenting ideas, even coding!
Although here I find myself, on Hacker News....
EDIT: This might be what I find troubling about Elon Musk's Neuralink project... I already find it very useful to disconnect from my "digital neocortex" (i.e. social media, Google, Youtube, Wikipedia, etc) to get work done... With a higher bandwidth connection that goes even directly to my limbic system and produces a more compelling experience than reality itself can... Would I just be stuck in a high tech opium den with no will to leave?
My main point is: Don't go online without a purpose. It's fine to use the Internet as a resource when you need it. Mindlessly consuming information, however, is not and I think it is more harmful then many people realize.
Likewise, it's only when you're hungry that your body is telling you what you need (e.g. you crave for some vitamins, something salty or meat ...) . If you're munching all day (no matter whether it's good food or junk food) then you don't get hungry and you don't really know what your body needs and chances are you have eaten more than what's healthy.
Yes, I see how it may come across as general advice. This may sounds delusional but I believe (which of course means I could be way off) that what I've described in my original post is rather a universal rule than advice. However, people who read what I've written will probably not get anything out of it because it's not what they need right now. It's just that what I've criticized: another bit of information to congest their brain with.
This reminds me of the 80s when my teenage self also had to get the bus to the library to borrow dusty old books on BASIC from its darkest secluded corners that were frequented by almost no-one besides by other dorks and the occasional weirdo looking for an entirely different type of entertainment.
I find that books are still a far superior way to reach proficiency in almost anything, technology included. The Internet certainly has many good features for learning things, but I'm not sure efficiency is currently one of them.
"If I could talk to my 20 year old self I would recommend this: Stay away from the Internet as much as possible and don't look for general advice."
While I generally agree that you shouldn't overvalue general advice I don't find your argument very believable when you then go on to offer your own advice. Seems more like a convenient way to not having to address the article.
I'm all for going your own way, but it can't be just a reaction to something else. Especially in a relatively free industry like technology I increasingly see people who find themselves disliking the consequences of their decisions (often without realizing they made them in the first place).
> Seems more like a convenient way to not having to address the article.
There is no need to address the article as there is nothing wrong with it. It's a fine article! In fact, for my sake we may even call it perfect!
> I increasingly see people who find themselves disliking the consequences of their decisions (often without realizing they made them in the first place).
And here we actually agree! People don't realize which decisions they have made (and thus also don't realize what they've gotten themselves into)! My attempted explanation for why that is is that they absorb too much information and use that soup of ideas (which almost seems like white noise to me) as a reference for their decisions instead of waiting for an impulse from within (which in my experience occurs if you allow yourself enough time - just like you get sleepy at night or hungry in the morning - insofar I believe what I've described is more of a rule than advice).
Whether or not they do their own thing or want to follow a school-like path - that again doesn't matter I think but they have to "own" their decisions.
If I could talk to my 20 year old self I would recommend this: Stay away from the Internet as much as possible and don't look for general advice.
Most information is of little use no matter whether it's right, wrong, deep, entertaining, scientific, religious, whatever... Many may realize that but they continue to consume. The common trap is that most of us think there is no downside to consuming information and this, in my humble opinion is a huge mistake! It seems to me that the more stuff we shovel into our heads, the less able we are to get active. There is constantly such a long queue of inputs our brain wants to process that we have little energy left to actually develop intentions. When intention crystallize, motivation follows and so does action. I'd argue that people of average intelligence are not lacking success because they miss precious advice. It's because they don't actually have intentions! They can't allow themselves (mainly for financial oder societal reason, I assume) to relax and wait for curiosity to kick in. Instead they have it backwards: They hear about people who are having a career, they hear about others forming families, they hear the news telling them how the IOT is the future, they read up on cool stuff on wikipedia, read the biographies of celebreties, random stuff on reddit, they read career advice .... And then, from all that garbage, they try to deduce what to do. In most cases, that doesn't truly work because the result is not in line with their natural appetites and abilities.